The market is a crowdy, noisy and rowsy place the only thing that keeps you and helps you stay in the loop is being able to remain relevant as it’s no longer enough to send targeted messages based solely on your contacts’ demographics or interests—effective marketing also uses data about how their audience interacts with their business. This is called behavioral targeting.
Behavioral targeting makes highly personalized and timely marketing possible by pairing contact data with real-time information about the actions (and inactions) that those contacts take online—like what they are (or aren’t) doing on your website, in your app, or with your multichannel marketing campaigns.
Basics of behavioural targeting.
Behavioural targeting uses people’s activities like the browser they use, how often they travel, gaming and so on to determine which advertisements and messages resonates most with them. It leverages behavioural data—to trigger personalized marketing. That way, you can connect with prospects and customers who are most likely to purchase your products, engage with your app, or contract your services.
This is good for businesses, because personalized marketing is more effective. It’s also good for consumers because it helps filter irrelevant content.
Types of behavioural targeting.
With behavioral targeting, you can personalize your marketing based on several different sources of data:
- Website engagement: What are people looking at and clicking on your site?
- Campaign engagement: Which emails do people open and click?
- Purchase behavior: What items did someone purchase, add to their cart, or look at?
- App engagement: What actions have people taken (or not taken) in your app?
Website engagement
Using website engagement for behavioural targeting, you can personalise the user experience on your site. This includes surfacing pop-up promotions, ads, and links to related content. Segments of website visitors can see customised advertisements based on what products, services, and information they are interested in. Google remarketing ads are another way of leveraging website engagement—they’re used to recapture a visitors’ attention after they leave your site.
Campaign engagement
Campaign engagement helps you target based on who is opening your emails (or who isn’t), as well as what they click. This can help you fine-tune the way you organize your audience when you use this data as segmentation criteria. You can resend emails to non-openers, and to people who have been unengaged, and you can send emails to the people with the highest average engagement.
Purchase behaviour
Purchase behaviour is one of the most recognisable sources of behavioural targeting, because it is so common and powerful. Wherever you are on an e-commerce site, from the homepage to your shopping cart, odds are you’ll see suggestions for similar products and businesses—that’s behavioural targeting at work. You can use purchase behaviour to recommend things shoppers will like, show them appreciation, and give them incentives to buy something.
App engagement
Behavioural targeting is critical to driving app engagement, because it helps you deliver personalised marketing that incentives more usage, based on what people are (or aren’t) doing in your app. You can even segment users based on their behaviours within a specific time-frame—like if you want to congratulate people in your language learning app who just completed their first lesson or reach out to users who downloaded your app but haven’t logged-in within a week.